At 59, Edith Cooper never thought she’d make a career pivot. She spent nearly 30 years working her way up at Goldman Sachs, but then, she was approached to co-found a company called Medley. Who was the other co-founder? Jordan Taylor, AKA her daughter. The mom and daughter duo launched Medley, a coaching platform equipping Millennial-aged workers with the skills they need to be dynamic, inclusive, and authentic leaders.
In this episode, Jordan and Edith share:
Whether Jordan calls Edith “mom” or “Edith” in the workplace
The parts of her Wall Street HR career that Edith misses
Why we forget to support middle-level managers – and how Medley solves for it
The moments Jordan relies on Edith as “mom” vs. “co-founder”
Why boundary setting is crucial to success as co-founders who are friends or family
Psst…this episode of “9 to 5ish” is brought to you by New York Life. Their financial professionals can help you navigate life’s decisions, big and small.
On Reflecting on Her Responsibility as the Head of Human Resources
Edith: I remember welcoming all the analysts, 2,000 from around the world to New York for orientation. Someone raised their hand and said, “do you feel that you can bring your whole self to work?” And I said, “Yeah, generally.” I kind of basically gave a no-answer nonsense. And after we were done, my Chief of Staff at the time pulled me aside and said, “You didn't really answer that question. You need to really think about why that person asked that question and what it took for the person to ask that question. So as a follow up, we're going to sit down and I'm going to tell you what I know to be true with respect to why that matters to a generation of people and how you basically need to get it together.”
On Navigating the Mother-Daughter Relationship at Work
Jordan: 2020 was an especially difficult period where I was going through a really hard time. I had some pretty serious mental health challenges. And I think that was probably the hardest moment because Edith just wanted to be my mom. She just wanted to be there for me. She wanted to just tell me it would be okay and just support me in any way that she can. And we had a business to run. We had employees, investors, customers – we had things we needed to do. And there was and there was tension. Having gone through that and where we are now, the benefits to our relationship have been really powerful. We've created a way to communicate with each other both as mother daughter and as business partners that would have been hard for us to get to without this really formative experience of us trying to build a company together.
On Avoiding Perfection to Get Results
Jordan: When you're building a business, your greatest resource is time. Being super time constrained with a never ending to do list is almost directly at odds with wanting things to be perfect. Because you can't make things perfect when you have a very finite amount of time and you have a hundred things to do every single hour. I have really had to learn. I'm still learning – and Edith and I really actually approach decision making in a very different way sometimes – to not try to get to 150 percent and to accept the fact that probably my 80% is more than is more than good enough. And so I've been constantly working, constantly, pushing back at my own instinct to try to make things as perfect as they possibly can be.
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